Custom Assembly Nanotech Discovery

Nanotech discovery could have radical implications

Salvatore Torquato, a Princeton University scientist, is proposing turning a central concept of nanotechnology on its head. If the theory bears out it could have radical implications not just for industries like telecommunications and computers but also for our understanding of the nature of life.

Torquato and colleagues have published a paper in the Nov. 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, the leading physics journal, outlining a mathematical approach that would enable them to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another.

"In a sense this would allow you to play God, because the method creates, on the computer, new types of particles whose interactions are tuned precisely so as to yield a desired structure," said Pablo Debenedetti, a professor of chemical engineering at Princeton.

Nanotechnologists rely on something called "self-assembly." Self-assembly refers to the fact that molecular building blocks do not have to be put together in some kind of miniaturized factory-like fashion. Instead, under the right conditions, they will spontaneously arrange themselves into larger, carefully organized structures.

But Torquato and his colleagues, visiting research collaborator Frank Stillinger and physics graduate student Mikael Rechtsman, have taken an inverse approach to self-assembly.
Instead of employing the traditional trial-and-error method of self-assembly that is used by nanotechnologists and which is found in nature, Torquato and his colleagues start with an exact blueprint of the nanostructure they want to build.

They illustrated their technique by considering thin films of particles. If one thinks of the particles as pennies scattered upon a table, the pennies, when laterally compressed, would normally self-assemble into a pattern called a triangular lattice.

Triangular Lattice

But by optimizing the interactions of the "pennies," or particles, Torquato made them self-assemble into an entirely different pattern known as a honeycomb lattice (called that because it very much resembles a honeycomb).

Honeycomb Lattice

Nanotech discovery could have radical implications

Printing New Organs

By Lois M. Collins
Deseret Morning News

An emerging branch of medicine called "organ printing" takes a patient's own healthy cells and uses a printer, cell-based "bio-ink" and "bio-paper" to create tissue to repair a damaged organ.
Now a hydrogel or "bio-paper" developed by a University of Utah College of Pharmacy professor is a key component of a $5 million National Science Foundation-sponsored study that includes organ printing.
"Think of taking a blood vessel — a cylindrical object — and trying to reconstruct it in 3D with two-dimensional slices," said U. Presidential Professor of Medicinal Chemistry Glenn D. Prestwich, who created the hydrogel. To make the cylinder, those flat doughnut sections are literally printed, one thin layer of cells and hydrogel at a time, the platform moving away from the printer's "bio-ink"-delivering needles as the cylinder grows.
The cells in the gel are alive and will begin to move from one side to the other, one "doughnut" to the other, fusing and interweaving to form a complete, living cylinder.

The NSF study will try first to print blood vessels and cardiovascular networks. Once they prove it can be done, the scientists will look at more complex organs such as livers and kidneys and simpler but more mechanical organs like the esophagus, Prestwich said.
The hydrogel has other uses. Besides use in organ printing, Prestwich believes it is about ready for prime time in basic medicine applications.
Experts believe that millions of people who need transplants eventually will benefit from organ printing. "I believe in five years we're going to be able to print simple organs, such as a cardiovascular network or a urethra," Prestwich said.

deseretnews.com | U. makes a healing 'bio-paper'